On Tue, Aug 11 2009, Josselin Mouette wrote: > Le mardi 11 août 2009 à 08:24 -0500, Manoj Srivastava a écrit : >> Hmm. I see very little benefit here. Firstly, to use build id, >> you have to intercept the upstream build system and add --build-id >> (and perhaps the --build-id-style) option to ld, instead of the current >> method of letting the upstream build happen and working on the produced >> objects -- this is more intrusive. And what do we gain? > > Without build IDs, GDB has no sure way to map the binary to the correct > detached symbols. Therefore it will read the whole file to compute its > CRC32 (!) and compare it to the one stored in the gnu_debuglink section > of the binary. > > This sole issue is responsible for gdb taking up to several minutes to > produce a backtrace for binaries using big libraries like xulrunner. And > don’t even think of using the debugging symbols over the network in this > case.
Yes, that would indeed be silly -- if you have managed to intercept ld and added --build-id to the executable, it would be silly not to have the file in the location gdb will look in. However, if you do not use the build-id mechanism, and use what we currently use in dh_strip and friends, objcopy --add-gnu-debuglink adds information that gdb looks at to figure out where the debug symbols live -- and no CRC check sum is ever performed. So a mixed mode approach would indeed be bad. But a pure debug link method does not have these stated drawbacks. Given the difficulty in intercepting ld commands in upstream build systems, I would be inclined to just standardize the debug link method, given that it produces human readable file names (so I can determine manually if I have debugging symbols for some library or not) as an added bonus. manoj -- Work is the crab grass in the lawn of life. Schulz Manoj Srivastava <sriva...@debian.org> <http://www.debian.org/~srivasta/> 1024D/BF24424C print 4966 F272 D093 B493 410B 924B 21BA DABB BF24 424C -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-policy-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org